


Charm/Strange

by SlippinMickeys



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, MSR
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 13:58:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20931368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SlippinMickeys/pseuds/SlippinMickeys
Summary: A dance of intellectuals.





	Charm/Strange

Sometimes she thinks he must be a polymath; he seems an endless source of knowledge, a wellspring of facts and figures on the oddest of subjects and never once has she seen him touch a reference book.

She had been so used to being the smartest person in the room before she met him that she felt an almost physical shock the first time he lectured her about something with which she was unfamiliar. She remembered feeling immeasurably pleased, impressed, thankful this challenge of a man had been set before her.

She doesn’t remember when she started doing it, but she seemed to use up a lot of her spare time reading up on things he might one day talk to her about.

She now knows vast reams of information on cryptozoology, climate change, hyperphysics. Could talk at length about Mokele-mbembe and the six flavors of quarks. Should he one day bring up the philosophy of Kant, she’s locked, loaded and ready to roll.

There are facts she’s glad to know and some she wishes she didn’t.

Proximity to Fox Mulder is an education unto itself. She sometimes thinks knowledge might be his religion.

He looked up from where he was going through old X-Files, sorting through newspaper clippings and accordioned pages of old dot-matrix printouts. The floor was awash in newsprint and the file cabinets seemed to be overflowing onto their feet in a parchment tsunami. He was holding up the front page of an old newspaper, its edges sepia-toned and hoary. Its headline read “THE END OF THE WORLD?”

The accompanying picture was below the fold and she vaguely thought it didn’t even matter. The world is always ending, careening toward destruction at 67,000 miles an hour.

“Guess the date,” he said.

She gave it a thoughtful look.

“October 13th, ’61,” she said.

“Ha ha,” he said, and threw it into the refuse pile.

He rubbed a hand over his face and stood on a sigh, his knees popping as he rose.

“Uncle,” he said, stretching. She could see the lines of his deltoids pushing against his shirt and she looked away.

He’d gotten it into his head two days ago that they should thin out the files in their basement office and digitize the ones they seemed to reference most. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Her own sorting was in several small, neat piles across the table in the back of the office. She smiled at him in sympathy.

“This was a terrible idea. Why did you let me talk you into it?” he said.

“You’re a persuasive guy,” she replied, “and anyway, when was the last time me telling you something was a bad idea actually stopped you from doing it?”

“You have a point,” he said, flopping down into his desk chair, which had papers on it too; they crinkled as he sat.

He let out a groan.

“We need a case to get out of this office,” he said, “I don’t want to see this mess for another week at least.”

They seemed to be out in the field less and less lately, a fact she’d noticed but hadn’t given much thought to.

“Nothing in your inbox?” she gestured toward his desk.

“Nothing worth your time,” he said absently.

“_My_ time?” she asked.

“What?”

“You said ‘nothing worth _your_ time,’” she said.

“Did I?” he shrugged.

He wasn’t one to misspeak.

“Mulder?” she said, and his face got a queer look to it.

He looked at her a long minute and she felt a flush go up her neck. She hoped he didn’t notice.

“Somewhere along the way,” he finally spoke, his eyes holding her gaze, “I stopped worrying whether people or cases were worth my time and became more concerned about whether they were worth yours.”

She wondered if she looked as speechless as she felt.

“Anyway,” he said, turning away, a hint of embarrassment on his face, “I really wish there was a cryptid or something in Hawaii. It’s as far away as I can think, and I’ve heard the crater at Haleakala looks like the surface of Mars. I’d like to see that.”

She felt rooted in place and cleared her throat.

“Haven’t you got a backlog of vacation time Skinner’s been bugging you about?” she said, wondering how her voice sounded so grounded and even when she felt anything but. “You could take a week, go check it out, leave the rest of the sorting to me.”

Mulder smiled sheepishly at her.

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” he said, vaguely gesturing to the mess on the floor, “anyway,” he went on, his voice going kind of quiet, “I wouldn’t want to go without you.”

It was in that flotsam and jetsam of papers and files that Dana Scully learned her strangest truth yet.

Maybe his religion wasn’t knowledge after all. Maybe it was her.

  
The End


End file.
